Trusting Others to ‘Do the Math’

Researchers effectively trust the work of others anytime they use software tools or custom software. In this article I explore this notion of trusting others, using Digital Humanities as a focus, and drawing on my own experience. Software is inherently flawed and limited, so its use in scholarship demands better practices and terminology, to review research software and describe development processes. It is also important to make research software engineers and their work more visible, both for the purposes of review and credit

Nonlinearity and Incarnation in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Susan Howe’s “The Nonconformist’s Memorial”

In “Nonlinearity and Incarnation in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Susan Howe’s ‘The Nonconformist’s Memorial,’” I argue that nonlinearity is present in both language and literature, whether printed or electronic, and investigate two specific cases of poetic nonlinearity in printed works. Nonlinearity in language generally has been identified in, or at least suggested by, the work of a wide array of different literary and media theorists, and the comments of both scholars and poets reveal that nonlinearity is present to an even greater extent in poetry than in other written forms. In particular, this nonlinearity is evident in the decentered, linked structure of Eliot’s Four Quartets, which demands that its readers explore the space of the text and discover connections of various kinds within the Quartets. In “The Nonconformist’s Memorial” nonlinearity is a component of the nonconformist textual practices Susan Howe employs, which implicate and include the reader in the text’s confession of nonconformity. In both instances, Walter Ong’s notion of secondary orality is a significant component of poetic nonlinearity, and the hypertextual structure of lexia and link is a useful model for approaching these nonlinear poems. Finally, both poems include reference to the Christian Incarnation, which is itself an act of divine communication that cannot be fully conveyed by text alone; the nonlinear structures of these two works create the possibility for a fuller communication of the message of Incarnation than is possible with traditional texts

About the data: RDF generation for Belfast Group Data

This document describes the steps that are done by the “prep_dataset” script, which harvests and builds the RDF dataset for the Belfast Group Poetry|Networks website, which is used in part as the basis for the network graphs and chord diagrams. Prior to running the script, significant work was required to 1) to tag names in the EAD and TEI and 2) expose the tagged information as RDF so it could be harvested, but this work is documented elsewhere

What Do We Mean When We Say “Belfast Group”?

In creating a project to investigate the relationships among members of the Belfast Group, it is important to know exactly what that Group is. Being specific about this when creating our data was critical so we could accurately measure who was connected to this thing we call “the Belfast Group.” But, as often happens with humanities data, it turns out that things are a little messy. In this case, while the term originally refers to the writing workshop begun by Philip Hobsbaum, many critics and commentators have also used it to refer to the idea of a Belfast “school” of poets (see Clark 1, 6). Many members of this supposed school—Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, among others—were, of course, participants in the writing workshop, which adds to the slippage between the two uses. But while it is demonstrably true that a writing workshop existed, it is less clear whether there was any unified purpose that might constitute a school; as Norman Dugdale put it, the “The Group had no manifesto, no corporate identity, no programme beyond providing a forum in which writers [...] could produce their wares and have them discussed” (Dugdale et al. 54). For the purposes of this site, then, when we speak of the “Belfast Group,” we mean the weekly writing workshop founded by Hobsbaum and continued by Seamus and Marie Heaney, along with Michael Allen and Arthur Terry

Women in the Belfast Group

As we worked on this project and looked at various iterations of the data, we noticed something troubling about some of the women we knew were associated with the Belfast Group: while they sometimes appeared central to the network at other times they were completely invisible. What was happening

Archival Biases and Futures

Social network analysis is typically used where data are complete and all connections within a system are known. However, as other humanities networking projects have discovered, building a network based on historical data means that we are inevitably working with incomplete information. In other words, the lack of connections in our graph doesn’t mean that no connection exists, but only that we have no documented evidence of one. For a large-scale, historical project like the Republic of Letters, this incomplete information is due to the historic nature of the content they are working with; in other words, not all of the evidence exists any more. In our case, we have a different bias and different missing data because we have primarily used information from a single archive as the source of our network dat

Bridging Digital Humanities Internal And Open Source Software Projects Through Reusable Building Blocks

Software development is often an integral aspect of Digital Humanities projects.  By working to generalize and build small modules or utilities targeting specific needs rather than large-scale systems, DH software developers have the capacity to generate tools with greater potential for scholarly reuse, which should enable more rapid development on future projects, and allow developers to focus on innovative work. This poster demonstrates a case study of modular software developed as part of ongoing DH projects. There is a tendency among some institutions, particularly libraries, to adopt existing large-scale Open Source Software solutions and adapt them for local needs; but as Hector Correa points out, this approach results in skipping the work of thinking carefully about users and local needs (Correa, 2017).  If large-scale software solutions developed by coalitions of libraries are problematic (Princeton University Library Systems, 2017) where needs are at least similar, even where content structures or workflows differ, this problem is redoubled for research software, which is much more likely bespoke to a particular problem.  As Correa argues, single-purpose software is less complex and easier to understand and manage; and understanding the logic of code is crucial for research that is based on or otherwise makes use of software (Koeser, 2015). Applying best practices from software development such as modular design can mitigate these problems through an emphasis on delivering working components of software and focusing on simplicity of purpose. These projects provide a view into the ongoing process of balancing customized solutions to DH projects with generalizing focused portions of functionality. Modular design aimed at ‘doing one thing and doing it well’ offers the possibility of creating an ecosystem of reusable packages that are widely useful and applicable, and can participate in a larger community of open source and other DH software research

lenape-timetree

What's Changed Split out repo; convert this repo to timetree code only (hugo theme + js) by @rlskoeser in https://github.com/Princeton-CDH/lenape-timetree/pull/267 Release v1.0.3 by @rlskoeser in https://github.com/Princeton-CDH/lenape-timetree/pull/268 Full Changelog: https://github.com/Princeton-CDH/lenape-timetree/commits/1.0.